Text/Echo
When did you start filming your phone?
In my impression, the earliest smart phone is almost naked, even if you take a capacitive pen to swipe back and forth on the screen, it seems that few people paste a film to protect the screen, until one day, there are various film boys on the streets, when the mobile phone or tablet film seems to have become a kind of wonderful just need, and the consumption has become extremely exaggerated. Although from the root cause, this should actually be because pure touchscreen mobile phones have finally begun to become popular, but to put it bluntly, I think this should be attributed to the big sale of a mobile game, this game was born in April 2010, and in the following more than a year quickly became popular around the world "Fruit Ninja".
This is Halfbrick's decades of fame and fortune, smoothly landed and adapted to ALMOST all possible touch screen mobile phone systems such as IOS, Android, Symbian, etc., and even appeared on Xbox, Playstation and even PS VR and other host platforms and PCs, Time magazine evaluated it as "one of the top 50 iPhone apps in 2011", with sales of more than 200,000 copies in the first month, and the total number of downloads in 2015 has exceeded one billion, which is another mobile game miracle... ... Looking back at "Fruit Ninja" now, even through the dry text data, we can feel how outrageous this mobile game monster of that year really is.
Interestingly, in that era of closed information, we probably didn't realize that we had just downloaded such a great thing, just because from any point of view, this game is really a bit too small:
The installation package of less than 100M has no additional data to download, the same gameplay can not even last more than thirty minutes of game time, and worry about different style game scenes and level design? Then you really think too much, even if it is compared to the popularity at that time, so did some long-term updates of "Plants vs. Zombies" and "Angry Birds", with the volume of "Fruit Ninja" is only worthy of the casual mobile game called "back to basics", it seems that this guy is really completely inheriting the game concept of many predecessors of the "Nokia era", and will only play a role under the premise that the owner is bored to explode and will never be noisy, and will only occupy everyone's fragmented time and will never delay everyone's normal life...
At least in theory, so, except for the exclamation sentence "I really saw a ghost", I really have no idea how I was so ghostly and obsessed with such a rough game.
Is it because the game itself is so great and addictive? I think...... Possibly, after all, fruit ninjas, as the name suggests, as a ninja master who can't get along with fruits, you just need to gently slide the screen, let the fingertips transform into a few cold lights, you can see your "enemies" are precisely cut into various fruit brands, even if you can't empathize with this strange ninja master, you can't experience the pleasure of revenge, then this random slashing and killing can also greatly satisfy your suppressed desire for destruction since childhood.
This is just the most basic fun of Fruit Ninja, when the time is ripe, by chance - maybe you are finally tired of the joy of slashing and killing, eager to experience something more challenging, or you inadvertently hit a beautiful combo, in the brilliant visual reward of the unimaginable amazing score, you will really sink your heart to observe carefully, patiently wait, and start to study how to cut more fruit with less knife, like a real kendo master, three at a time, Four, five, or even a bunch of fruits of up to two digits are cut off with a knife, and naturally like a real master, they will rejoice in the sweet and sour song of the sword blade breaking through the sky and fruits in the game, rejoicing in the great increase in their visible skills.
And in order to ensure that players can enter the room, or at least not accumulate too much frustration due to helplessness, or may just want to add a little entertainment to the monotonous cut fruit, in the follow-up update of "Fruit Ninja", Halfbrick also added such things as "Crazy Banana" (red and yellow, after cutting, a huge amount of fruit will burst out for you to cut), "double banana" (blue and yellow, after cutting will double the score for a period of time), "frozen banana" (you can understand at a glance, freeze time space). , slowing down the rate of fruit fall), and even rare things like dragon fruit, which greatly enhance the playability and uncertainty of the game. At the same time, they also followed the trend by introducing an achievement system for exchanging different cool swords, which also provided players with some additional playing power.
Even so, it's not easy to make a big deal out of Fruit Ninja:
First of all, in the classic mode of the game, the fruits that are thrown on the screen at the same time will gradually increase with the game process, faster and faster, and if you accidentally accumulate and miss up to three fruit games, it will fail, although the accumulation of 100 points can make up for a previous mistake, but under the increasingly intensive fruit offensive, if you do not work hard for many years, it is a fool's dream to continue your life in this way;
Secondly, probably because the production team Halfbrick was afraid that we would not be exciting enough, he thoughtfully mixed a large number of bombs into the pile of fruits, ensuring that any player who accidentally cut it could be directly eliminated. And the number of bombs will continue to rise as the game process continues, and the situation that there are more bombs than fruits on the same screen in the later stage is definitely not rare, even if you can quickly avoid it one by one, it is still very uncomfortable for the player to always be disrupted.
However, in the subsequent versions of the game, you can choose to challenge the time-limited mode without bombs: as much as possible in a minute and a half, just try to cut as many fruits as possible, completely without any other fancy settings; and in the aforementioned arcade mode, the punishment for cutting the bomb will also become a minus, clear screen and erased prop state, which is friendly, complex, wonderful and rich in content, which is more than a star and a half stronger than the harsh classic mode.
But the question is, is the nascent arcade mode really more fun than the classic mode?
At first glance, this problem is really stupid, although the arcade mode of "Fruit Ninja" is still not as rich as other fire mobile games, but it will not be compared with the monotonous classic mode, right? But before we make up our minds, we might as well imagine a scenario like this: One day in 2011, when you came a few minutes early, you decided to pull out your phone and play a game to pass the time. At this time, will you choose to swipe the mobile phone immediately, and then you can say the classic mode of stopping without nostalgia, or endure the pleasure and temptation of "instant rewards", risk the game being interrupted or even miss the train yourself, and solemnly start an arcade journey?
Of course, I think any normal-thinking gamer would prefer their work to be large, textured, and full of content, in short, to try to stay away from the embarrassing label of "casual game", but this iron law does not seem to apply to the special "Fruit Ninja".
Think about it, in the days when casual mobile games came to prominence and people's bottom line did not allow the placement of mobile games to become popular, it was Precisely Halfbrick's "Fruit Ninja" that corrected the insurmountable nature of several mobile game upstarts with the "Sleeping Rohan" style - who said that the game must have different levels? And why must there be a achievable purpose to be complete? Since the purpose of the player entering the game is to relax and relax, the game works that take the essence so that the player can quickly refresh themselves should also be very popular...
And it is. The "Fruit Ninja" born under the guidance of this theory can be said to be the essence of the perfectly grasped casual mobile game, which is invincible to the battlefield of fragmented time for a long time; but no one can think that compared to the placement of the mobile game that was completely rotten a few years later, "Fruit Ninja" itself is about to become an excellent representative of the hardcore mobile game, and the irony also proves that The choice of Halfbrick to enrich the game content is actually not unreasonable, maybe they really found the "casual mobile game" long ago. It's definitely not a sure road to success — it's just that your abilities and choices are just as mediocre, which puts the upgraded Fruit Ninja into the awkward situation of "high or low", and gradually disappears in the following years.
In fact, Halfbrick has also tried to learn from Revo to carry out multi-party linkage and create IP classics, but the final effect is well... You may not remember that in June 2011, the game was linked to the DreamWorks animation "Cat in Boots", after all, there is not much room in "Fruit Ninja" to show the theme elements of this cat, although several challenge levels in the game are quite interesting;
After that, they also planned to cooperate with "New Line Cinema" to launch a live-action version of "Fruit Ninja", but for various reasons this plan was delayed again and again, and soon because Halfbrick found that his new work "Jetpack Joyride" also showed the potential of a big sale, it seemed that there was no need to hang on a tree in "Fruit Ninja" and was completely shelved, and now players can only go to a non-existent video website to enjoy the official animation "". Fruit Ninja: Frenzy Force" to understand the game's ridiculous story background, to find out who is so annoying to put bombs in the fruit.
Of course, this series of "errors in judgment" can be attributed to Halfbrick's management problems in the end, the game development team and the "big people on the top" between you and me, and finally have to run away from the story is actually quite exciting, but the space is limited and will not be repeated here, if you are interested, we will introduce this company in detail in the "Game Evolution" series.
Anyway, even if the company is single-minded, with the specificity of "Fruit Ninja", it is difficult to stand out in that year, just like the "film immortals" who will eventually be abandoned by the times, they have to change their comfortable posture to accept their fate - after a long time of dormancy, it is better to take advantage of the nostalgic east wind to launch the texture at the right time, but the sequel is similar, although it is difficult to make a comeback, but the good villains can harvest a little feelings, but they are much luckier than the old opponents who also seized the fragmentation time together.
And as for the fate of this old rival from unlimited scenery to no one, that is the story we will tell later.
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